Spread Art is an artist-run creative incubator designed to foster new work through residencies & collaborations with artists, curators & organizations throughout the world.

February 2012

February 26, 2012

This Saturday, Spread Art's Christina deRoos and Thomas Bell will be hard at work with Low Lives: Occupy!

Christina is one of the Co-Producers of Low Lives and on the selection comittee of the special edition of Low Lives- Low Lives:Occupy, an international platform designed to enable artists, audiences, and presenters in alliance with the Occupy movement to support the occupation and produced in collaboration with Occupy With Art. All the information you need is below and if you can make it out to the Hemispheric Institue on Saturday March 3rd, we'll see you there, if not, you can watch it online.

***********Low Lives: Occupy!

Event Date: 3 March 2012

6-10 pm EST

The Hemispheric Institute, which will serve as presenting partner and official New York City venue for Low Lives: Occupy!, will present one live performance during the March 3 event, and screen all other selections in real time using live-streaming technology.

On March 3rd, 2012, Low Lives: Occupy! an international platform designed to enable artists, audiences, and presenters in alliance with the Occupy movement to support the occupation, will transmit live performances, actions, and happenings online as they occur in real time around the world. Participating artists, artist collectives, Occupy groups, and presenters worldwide will expand the reach and visibility of the Occupy protests by broadcasting to an international community and audiences. The Occupy protests, and the myriad of perspectives and experiences related to this unique moment, will be amplified, explored, and experimented with, through Low Lives’ internet-based creative platform. Low Lives: Occupy! recognizes the powerful opportunity that is the presentation of performances from around the world, and invites artists to open eyes and minds by presenting a radical re-imagining of possible ways of existing and relating.

Over the past 4 years Low Lives has developed a platform that invites and enables artists, audiences, and presenting venues to "plug in and participate" from anywhere an internet connection exists. This technological platform brings a history of supporting artists’ full creative freedom to imagine new worlds and is now offered to artists interested to present work in solidarity with #OWS. Online documentation of the live event will allow Low Lives: Occupy! to inspire online audiences far into the future.

• Artists/Individuals/Groups broadcast performances from their location of choice (e.g., art venues, studios, public spaces) using live video streaming networks such as Ustream.tv• Performances are presented consecutively, each immediately following the previous• All performances are fed through one channel and projected at presenting venues, and available for online viewing in real time and after the event• Online chat allows artists and online audiences to interact and comment on the work as it occurs

Co-Presenters:• Low Lives: Occupy! invites any person, group of people, and presenters to “plug in and project” the broadcast in their homes, venues, building facades, and other public spaces for their local communities • Technical support is provided in advance of the event date to facilitate Co-Presenters preparation and to coordinate overall production• No fee to participate

About Low LivesFounded in 2009, Low Lives is an international platform for live performance-based works transmitted via the internet and projected in real time. Low Lives examines works that critically investigate, challenge, and extend the potential of performance practice presented live through online broadcasting networks. These networks provide a new alternative and efficient medium for presenting, viewing, and archiving performances. Low Lives offers local and global audiences a contextual frame from which to consider live performance in both the physical and virtual space.

The platform celebrates the transmission of ideas beyond geographical and cultural borders, and opens multicultural and intergenerational dialogue through visual language, new technologies, and contemporary expressions. Low Lives is about both the presentation and transmission of performative gestures from a particular place and time. Low Lives produces an annual Networked Performance Festival. For more information, visit www.LowLives.net

About Occupy With ArtOccupy With Art (Formerly Occupennial) is an affinity group of the Arts & Culture working group. We are artists, writers, curators, and art professionals lending our skills to produce art, cultural events and projects, with a particular focus on OWS itself as a social art process. We work with organizations and artists that require a focused team to facilitate their projects. We produce art projects, large-scale events, and exhibitions. Our website, www.occupywithart.com, serves as an information hub for current and past art-related activities in the OWS movement. We are committed to building relationships within OWS and with outside arts organizations.

About Hemispheric Institute of Performance and PoliticsThe Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics is a collaborative, multilingual and interdisciplinary network of institutions, artists, scholars, and activists throughout the Americas. Working at the intersection of scholarship, artistic expression and politics, the organization explores embodied practice—performance—as a vehicle for the creation of new meaning and the transmission of cultural values, memory and identity. Anchored in its geographical focus on the Americas (thus “hemispheric”) and in three working languages (English, Spanish and Portuguese), the Institute's goal is to promote vibrant interactions and collaborations at the level of scholarship, art practice and pedagogy among practitioners interested in the relationship between performance and politics in the hemisphere. www.hemisphericinstitute.org

February 15, 2012

Experimental Performances Featuring Artists from Around the GlobeStreamed Live From Paris to Detroit and Brooklyn

555 Arts, Dimanche Rouge, Vaudeville Park and Spread Art invite you to enjoy a series of experimental performances streamed live from Paris and featuring performers from around the globe. Since its inception in February 2011, Dimanche Rouge has hosted 12 unique editions, featuring over 300 artists coming from over 50 countries. With this 13th edition, Dimanche Rouge invites you to dive into an international edition of performance art!PERFORMANCES

555 Nonprofit Gallery and Studios is a volunteer artist-run arts organization providing affordable studios and workspace, gallery space, exhibition programs, arts education programs, and an artist in residency program. In partnership with Southwest Solutions, 555 will be converting the former Third Police Precinct's offices, holding cells, and jail cells into studios, gallery space, live work space, and workshops. Studios have 10'-20' ceilings, natural light, and range in size from 100-500sq.ft. Opening is planned for the spring of 2012.

Vaudeville Park’s mission is to showcase unique and affordable community arts programming in Williamsburg Brooklyn. We strive to provide local artists with opportunities to hone their craft and present their work in a venue that is accessible, welcoming and professional.

Spread Art is an artist-run creative incubator designed to foster new works through collaborations with artists, curators, and organizations from around the world. Spread Art supports emerging artists through group and solo exhibitions, music events, and performance showcases, and also facilitates opportunities for youth and adults to explore their creativity and increase self-awareness through art. Spread Art supports the creation and evolution of art festivals and cultural collaborations locally, nationally, and internationally.

Come sink your claws into the 20th installment of the performance and theory series PERFORMANCY FORUM! This is performance in its natural habitat. It is interdisciplinary, political, passionate, always visceral, not always 'G' rated...

8pm-midnight

$5-$10 sliding scale suggested donation

For this event, we will focus our analytic efforts in the direction of context, text, and other words with ‘x’ in them:

How and why do performance artists use text/words in their performances? What is “subtext” in the context of each of these works?Does text confine/dictate “meaning” and limit the possibilities for multiple interpretations of a performance? Can text be used purely as an aesthetic tool? Asemic vs. literal text vs. musical notationHow does the material (Facebook invite, this kind of blurb, etc) affect the context of the work presented? How do artists contextualize their own work through writing? What is an ‘artist’s statement’ and does it belong to us, or to industry? And so on….Please bring your questions/concerns/theories!

Remote Control Tomato: Duo Thomas Bell and Christina deRoos experiment with new ways of combining visual arts disciplines, performance art and music, and new technologies to create dense, self-rupturing clouds of image, concept, and noise that zoom in and out between grand political universality and deeply personal subjective experience. http://www.spreadart.org

PERFORMANCY FORUM began in 2009 as a project of the Panoply Performance Laboratory (PPL) while the collective was in residence at Surreal Estate. It has since become an open project, collaborating with spaces, sites, curatorial collectives, and many others to:

2.) Perform collective research, including drawing of parallels between current performance and social practices and attempts to locate them within historic, economic, socio-political, and aesthetic contexts.

3.) Provide a site (physical or cognitive) for complex and critical thought beyond academic and other institutional parameters, for political and cultural organization amongst artists, and for experimentation with modes, methods, and mediums in conjunction with concrete practice.

4.) Involve publics of 'artists' and 'non-artists' alike in constructive, collective, and critical analysis and debate of artistic operation.